Last week I wrote about the way specific technologies have lowered the barriers to entrepreneurship worldwide: Amazon Web Services, Google Drive (and Google Search), mobile devices combined with widespread wireless Internet service, and Facebook.
Most of these tools are what author Jonathan Zittrain would call “generative,” in that they are technologies which engender further innovation, thanks to their openness and extensibility. Like the earliest personal computers, AWS is an open-ended tool with virtually no restrictions. You can use a credit card to purchase an instance — a virtual server — and you can set it up and use it in almost any way your creativity will allow.
